Staff MemberPremium Member

For months, OnePlus has been teasing the upcoming arrival of custom backplates for their One series phone. This included bamboo, silk white and sandstone black "StyleSwap" covers. Unfortunately, the company has decided to kill the option before they ever launched it.

OnePlus shared in a blogpost that "technical difficulties" during mass production created some problems. Apparently, the custom covers would become slightly loose, which risked damage to the non-removable battery they was designed to protect.

Here's a quote of the blogpost with a few of the details,

We want to note that our “StyleSwap” covers were an ambitious and innovative concept for us; very few companies offer similar options. We focused heavily on how it would allow users to personalize and customize their Ones and offer more choice. But now we know that we could have designed the removal process of the back covers better; it’s tricky and makes frequent switches difficult. The swap can also leave the back cover slightly creaky or loose, and it risks damage to the battery which is exposed for a short time.

Ultimately, we made the very hard choice to stop production of StyleSwap covers for the OnePlus One. We simply aren’t comfortable mass releasing a product that does not offer the best user experience.

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Apparently, there were a few bamboo covers made that didn't suffer from this defect, so OnePlus plans to sell them in limited quantities with special instructions on how to install them.